


The Werewolf Paradox

by wheatear



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Character(s), Edinburgh, Gen, Injured Doctor (Doctor Who), Lupine Wavelength Haemovariform, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Modern Era, Murder Mystery, Season/Series 03, Temporal Paradox, Time Travel, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22231042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheatear/pseuds/wheatear
Summary: In modern-day Edinburgh, a man has been murdered by a great beast said to emerge during a full moon. The Doctor and Martha investigate, but this gruesome tale isn’t quite as straightforward as it first appears.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & Martha Jones
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2019





	The Werewolf Paradox

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariel_astaire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariel_astaire/gifts).



It was the Doctor’s idea.

“Fancy a trip to Edinburgh?”

Of course, modern-day Edinburgh was positively ordinary after some of the places they’d been. The city of New New York, a cargo ship in deep space, the moon landing... She’d seen things beyond her wildest dreams. There was also the small matter of… well, not moving in with the Doctor, exactly, but he’d given her a key to the TARDIS and it was easier if she had her stuff here instead of constantly popping back home for a change of clothes.

And she wanted to pick up a few things. Travel stuff. She didn’t know where they’d be going next. She might need sun lotion or trainers (they were always running from _something_ ) or winter clothes or… or, she didn’t know, but she figured that it was about time she prepared for a long trip. The Doctor assured her that the TARDIS had everything they might need, and she said that yeah, he could do the space stuff but everyday getting about? She’d rather do that herself.

Hence: Edinburgh.

They stepped onto the Royal Mile on a bright winter’s afternoon and Martha breathed in the chilly air and took in the sight of the cobbled stones, the many twisting alleyways and stairs, the shops, the great stone buildings, Edinburgh Castle high and imposing up on the hill, and the crowds of people with their shopping bags and their mobile phones, and breathed out a satisfied sigh.

“So how long is this shopping thing going to take?” the Doctor asked in the tone of a man who had never shopped for necessities in his life. Frivolities, yes, he loved a good frivolity. He was already eyeing up one of the many souvenir shops.

“Go on,” said Martha, nudging him towards a sign advertising the finest Scottish Highland tartan. “Let’s meet back here in an hour, yeah?”

“You sure?”

She scoffed. “I’ll be fine. We’re in Edinburgh, what could possibly go wrong?”

*

The Doctor didn’t turn up.

The allotted hour had gone by, she’d done her shopping and explored several of the more interesting nooks and crannies in the old part of town along the way – with all the free walking tours around she was going to suggest to the Doctor that they go on a ghost tour. And, granted, his idea of time was more fluid than most, so she gave it an extra ten minutes. Nothing.

She dumped her bags inside the TARDIS and called him.

“Martha, not now, I’m busy!”

He sounded excited and impatient and furtive all at once.

“Busy? Busy doing what?”

“There’s been a murder – actually, are you in the TARDIS?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Did you say a murder?”

“A murder, yes, might be alien, still figuring that out. Could you grab something in the TARDIS for me? It’s in the console…”

He gave her instructions to find the device he wanted, which was plugged into one of the screens on the console. It looked like a radio transmitter: metal casing, antennae, a couple of dials and a black screen. She took it, left the TARDIS, paused for a moment and then went back and grabbed something else from one of her bags: a first aid kit. If there was a murderer on the loose, other people might get hurt too.

“Martha!” said the Doctor delightedly when she arrived out of breath and handed him the device.

“Where’s the body?” she asked, looking around.

They were on one of Edinburgh’s many cobbled streets, not far from the Palace of Holyroodhouse, in fact, though the houses here looked ordinary. Across the street was a park enclosed by an ancient stone wall. She saw no sign of a body and no police.

“Back here,” the Doctor said, indicating behind him.

He opened the gate to one of the terraced houses and they walked around to the back garden where a piece of taupe had been laid over something body-shaped lying in the middle of the lawn. Two men stood around the body, one of them, Martha noted with some alarm, holding a hunting rifle half as long as she was tall.

“Meet Samuel and Glenn,” the Doctor introduced them. “Oi, Glenn, what are you doing with _that_?”

He indicated the hunting rifle. Glenn was a big man, the bigger of the two, white-haired but no less imposing for his age. Samuel was younger, she guessed thirty-something, and stolid, his arms folded, his light hair shaved close to his head.

“It killed our friend,” said Glenn, loading the rifle. “We’re taking it down before it takes any more lives.”

“What do you mean, _it_?” Martha asked. “Has anyone called the police?”

Glenn snorted. “We know what did it and that creature is beyond the ken of the police. We take care of our own problems around here.”

Martha looked at the Doctor. “How do we know one of them didn’t do it?”

“He wasn’t killed by a human,” said the Doctor. “Look…”

He glanced at Samuel for permission and the other man nodded. The Doctor knelt down and pulled back the taupe, revealing the corpse of a man with red hair, though the body was so mangled she could tell little else about him. Deep scratches on the face and chest, the throat completely torn out… She had to take a step back, holding her nose at the combined stench of blood and death. Gross.

“What killed him? Did you see it?”

The story quickly emerged. The Doctor hadn’t witnessed the murder himself, but he’d heard the screaming and hurried to investigate. The other men were neighbours of the dead man, they said, and both had witnessed the creature that killed him. They described it variously as a great black beast, a shadow, a hellhound.

“What was it doing here?” Martha asked.

“Hunting, most likely,” said Glenn. “There’ve been rumours for months of a wolf that hunts in the light of the full moon.”

She blinked, and then laughed as his meaning hit her. “A full moon? Come on, you don’t mean…”

Glenn scowled.

“Who exactly are you anyway?” Samuel asked. While they’d been talking, he’d gone inside the house and re-emerged with a second hunting rifle.

“She’s my partner,” said the Doctor quickly. “An expert in the supernatural and the occult, like me.”

“She sounded sceptical to me,” said Samuel.

“Well, every supernatural investigator needs a sceptical friend,” said the Doctor. “Like Mulder and Scully.”

“Sam, take care of the body,” said Glenn. “We don’t want poor Findlay rising from his grave.”

“Er, _what_?” said Martha. 

“See,” said the Doctor. “Sceptical friend. Tell me more about these rumours.”

*

By the time they left the house the sun had set, and Martha was both troubled and little the wiser. The Doctor had persuaded Glenn and Samuel to sit tight and let the two of them track down this beast. If they walked around the city carrying hunting rifles, they’d be arrested on sight. He promised to report back as soon as they found it, and with that Glenn grudgingly agreed to let them go.

The Doctor fiddled with one of the dials on the device she had given to him.

“Okay,” she said, “what’s that and will it help us find this beast?”

“It will,” said the Doctor. “I know what the beast is.”

“Oh?”

“I scanned the body and crosschecked it with the readings on this… It’s a haemovariform.”

“A what?”

The Doctor held the device in front of him and did a full circle with it until it made a crackling noise pointing in the right direction.

“This way! I can track it down with this now I’ve synced it to the haemovariform wavelength. It’s not far.”

They went through a gate and into the park which was nearly empty and dimly lit. Martha shivered, pulling her coat tighter around herself. The Doctor was focused, following the trail. She wondered why the two men were so reluctant to go to the police. They hadn’t seemed surprised by the existence of this beast. Had they encountered it before?

“Haemovariform,” she repeated. “Sounds like a blood disease.”

“It is, sort of. It’s a parasitic lifeform. It infects its hosts and its cells gradually multiply until it takes over. If I’m right, this one is a lupine variety.”

 _Lupine._ Hang on. She gave the Doctor a look.

“Are you talking about werewolves?”

The Doctor grinned. “I’m talking about werewolves.”

Okay, so she’d met a bloodsucking alien vampire in her very first encounter with the Doctor, alien witches trying to kill Shakespeare, and now she was about to meet an alien werewolf. Martha made a mental note to ask the Doctor if fairies were real too.

“Glenn was right all along.” She shook her head, smiling. “I thought they were just superstitious.”

“Well, they are superstitious, that’s why the psychic paper said I was an occult investigator. Best way to get them to trust me, apparently, since they don’t like the police.”

The palace loomed up from the darkness in front of them. There might still be tourists there, she thought. It wasn’t that late. But the Doctor took a detour and instead of entering the palace proper, they turned into the ruins of what had once been an abbey.

“Holyrood Abbey,” said the Doctor. “I had tea here in the sixteenth century–”

His tracking device made a louder buzzing sound and he stopped, looking around. Nothing but old stone and grass. They could barely see in the dark. Should have brought a torch, she thought, and contemplated using her phone – but then again, a light would only give away their location…

“It’s close,” said the Doctor. “Tread lightly.”

“So, this creature,” said Martha, “is it really a werewolf? Turning into a wolf during a full moon and all that?”

“Technically it’s the moonlight interacting with the wavelength of the parasite and allowing it to completely transform the host’s body, but…”

“It’s basically a werewolf then, yeah.”

The Doctor nodded. “I met one in Scotland before, over a century ago. This one might be a descendant. Do you know if the royal family are in Edinburgh right now?”

“What? Why would they be… God, do you think it’s going after the royal family?”

They were right next to a royal palace. The possibility hadn’t occurred to her.

“No, never mind. Stop.” The Doctor held out his arm, but she didn’t need telling twice. “It’s right here. Somewhere nearby…”

She couldn’t see a thing. She could hear her own heartbeat like a drum in her chest.

“Doctor,” she whispered, “what do we do if we’re attacked by a werewolf?”

“We’re not looking for a wolf,” the Doctor whispered back. “At best it would have managed a partial transformation when it killed Findlay, but right now it’ll be in human form. We only really need to worry when there’s a full moon.”

“Erm, Doctor.”

She pointed and the Doctor looked up.

Above them, the clouds had parted. The rising moon shone down, bright and round and full.

“Oh,” said the Doctor.

She had a vivid, split-second impression before the werewolf attacked: a great dark-grey beast, muzzle drawn back in a snarl, claws shining in the moonlight and too-long limbs. It wasn’t a wolf, it was man-shaped, a creature that could walk on two legs as well as four.

Then it bowled the Doctor over, there was a horrible gnashing _cracking_ sound, a scream and somehow in the dark and cold, her eyes fixed on the one thing that mattered: the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. It had fallen out of his coat pocket and rolled into the grass. She snatched it up, pointed it at the werewolf – she had no idea what it would do, if anything – and the resulting sound hurt her ears but the werewolf yowled and backed off, shaking its head.

A moment later it was gone, loping away into the ruins.

She dropped to the ground by the Doctor, shaking him. “Doctor! Are you all right?”

The Doctor groaned as he sat up and stretched his injured leg. He’d been bitten, savaged more like, and from the awkward way his knee was tilted she was sure the leg was broken too.

Good thing she had that first aid kit.

She grabbed it at once and set to work, the Doctor shaking his head.

“Martha, we can’t stay here, it could come back at any time!”

“Well, you’re not going anywhere,” she said, “and I’ve got the screwdriver, it doesn’t like that noise.”

“The screwdriver won’t keep it at bay forever. Martha, it’s a full moon. Everyone in the city is in danger. We have to stop it.”

He winced as she bandaged up the open wound, setting it as tight as she dared.

“I’m listening,” she said, aware that her hands were slippery with his blood. “Tell me what to do.”

“The tracker,” he said, indicating the device that he had dropped when the werewolf attacked. “It doesn’t just locate the wolf; it can force it back into its human form too. Set the dials all the way to the right and point. It’s the same frequency as the haemovariform, it’ll cancel it out.”

“Okay. What about you?”

“I’ll get back to the TARDIS.”

He tried to stand up and failed, his leg wobbling. Martha caught him, shaking her head.

“You can’t, you can barely walk! We need to get you to a hospital–”

“No!”

“I met you in a hospital, what’s wrong with hospitals?”

“When we met, I was perfectly fine and healthy and in control. If I go in like this, they’ll scan me, notice I’m a bit, well, not human, and that’s a lot of trouble I don’t need. Martha, there’s no time. That creature could be killing more people right now.”

“All right,” she said, thinking fast. “Just give me a second.”

She stood up, leaving the Doctor where he was for a moment while she picked up the tracker. No readings. Good. They were safe for now. She hurried over to a gnarled old oak and found a fallen branch that looked sturdy enough to lean on.

“A walking stick,” she explained when she returned to the Doctor. “Try it, come on.”

The Doctor got up, leaning his weight on the stick, and winced. “You don’t have to do this, you know. We could both go back to the TARDIS, catch up with it before it attacks anyone else.”

“I have everything I need, don’t I? Trust me. I’ll be fine.”

The TARDIS, as she knew from experience, wasn’t always the most reliable machine. The Doctor had once tried to take her to the famous Festival of the Five Moons at the edge of the Milky Way, but he’d overshot the chronology by some three hundred years and they’d landed in a ruin instead.

The Doctor looked at her, his eyes bright and sharp in the moonlight despite the pain he must be in, and nodded.

Sonic screwdriver tucked in one pocket, the tracking device held out in her hand, she set off. She didn’t look back, though the temptation was strong. She kept her gaze fixed on the readings, which told her that the werewolf had retreated up into the hillside, away from the palace.

As she climbed, the way became rougher and steeper, the air chillier. The wind whipped around her hair and she tucked in the collar of her coat. Sometimes clouds passed across the sky, obscuring the moon, but for the most part the bright moonlight lit her path.

 _I’m climbing Arthur’s Seat_ , she thought. _Why is it going up there? That’s away from all the people._

Lots of tourists walked up there in the day. But at night the hill was deserted. Half-formed thoughts darted around her head, like the shadows of the clouds passing across the hill. Maybe it was looking for somewhere to hide. Maybe the noise and light of the city had scared it off. Maybe…

Somewhere in the wilderness, a wolf howled, and the hairs on the back of Martha’s neck stood up. It was a primal, eerie sound, one that struck fear into her very human body, some ancestral instinct reacting to an ancient predator. She shivered, and went on.

It wasn’t far. She was only a couple of minutes from reaching the peak and the wind was strong. She was alone, yes, and unarmed, yes, but not defenseless. If there was one thing she had learned to do during her time with the Doctor, it was to trust him. He knew about this alien lifeform; she had full confidence that his plan would work. The only other thing she had to do was trust herself. She could make it. She could do this without him.

The crack of a gunshot broke her reverie, startling her with its proximity. Right up there!

“Oh my God,” she whispered, breaking into a run.

She scrambled up the hillside to the top of the cliff, and she could hear a man crying out, the werewolf snarling and growling, and then the scene became clear: at the very peak of Arthur’s Seat, silhouetted by the night sky, the werewolf leapt upon a man-shaped figure, knocking him to the ground, and tore out his throat. A second shot fired like a thunderclap in the night and she had no idea if it had hit anything, she just had to get up there–

“No!”

She pressed the sonic screwdriver, waving it wildly in any direction as she ran up to reach them and the werewolf backed off again with a whine, collapsing into the grass.

There were two men dead on the hillside, their hunting rifles beside them. Glenn and Samuel. They’d ignored the Doctor’s advice and gone after the werewolf themselves. A host of questions immediately presented themselves: how had they gotten up here first? Had they known where the werewolf would go?

But she couldn’t stop to think about that, because the werewolf was right there. It whined again, and then the clouds passed again over the moon and everything went dark, but in front of her the werewolf was shrinking, its fur receding… turning back into a man.

Her heart pounding, every sense on high alert, Martha approached.

Not a man, she thought, correcting herself as she got closer. A boy, a teenager perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old. He had red hair and freckles and his pale form was shivering in the cold wind. He was also injured, clutching his bleeding leg. He looked at her with fear and it occurred to her that the Doctor had told her to use the tracking device to turn him back into a human but he’d already done that himself, so… now what?

She held up her hands, to show that she meant no harm. “It’s okay,” she said to the boy. “I’m not going to hurt you. What’s your name?”

The boy was trembling uncontrollably. “Caleb.”

“Okay, Caleb,” she said. “I’m Martha. I’m a doctor, I can help you. It looks like you’ve been shot. Can I see that leg?”

He nodded slowly. Martha bit her lip, then went over to one of the dead men and pulled off his coat, bringing it over to Caleb. She felt awful for doing it, but Caleb needed it more. Then she crouched down by the boy and got out the first aid kit.

She was aware the whole time of Caleb watching her, of the dead men only a few feet away, the stench of blood, the slight acrid scent of gunpowder in the air. The moon was obscured by cloud, but what if the sky cleared again?

“Tell me about yourself, Caleb,” she said, to try and calm him, and if she was honest, herself. “Where do you live?”

“Just down the hill,” he said.

“Do you have a family?”

“My brother. I live with my brother.” There was a pause; she glanced up and saw that his eyes were wet. “No… He’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Findlay… I…”

And she understood. Findlay was the first human that the werewolf had murdered, the one that the Doctor had found. Red-haired like his brother.

No one had mentioned that. Glenn, Samuel: they’d acted as though Findlay’s death had been a coincidence, as if the werewolf had happened to come across him on the street. But maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe he’d been _inside_ the house.

“What happened?” she asked.

Moonlight shone down, helping her to see the bandages that she’d wrapped around Caleb’s leg to staunch the bleeding, but also… She looked up, and let out a quiet cry of fear. Caleb’s eyes had turned black.

“Why are you helping me?”

The words came out of Caleb’s mouth in Caleb’s voice, yet somehow different, alien. She knew without a doubt that it wasn’t Caleb speaking, and this was the most terrifying moment yet. Every muscle in her body screamed at her to run. She forced herself to stay calm.

“I’m a doctor,” she said. “You’re injured; it’s my job to treat you.”

“You’re not with them?”

It took her a moment to understand. “No – no, I’m not with them. Why did you kill them? Why did you kill Findlay?”

“They were keeping us prisoner,” the creature said, its great black eyes boring into her. “For months, while I grew in power, they kept us chained up. Even the brother.”

Oh, God. They hadn’t investigated the house. Some detectives they were. They’d thought Findlay had been killed out in the street and his neighbours had dragged his body into the garden, but…

“Why?” she whispered.

“To use me. A creature they could control, to threaten their enemies and sniff out alien artifacts they could sell…”

“But you escaped.”

The creature nodded.

“Why did you come up here?”

“To answer the call.”

She blinked. “The call?”

“A signal has been calling me. It isn’t human. I’m looking for a way off this planet.”

A way off this planet… It was looking for a way home? There was so much to process and she didn’t have a chance to because right then a familiar and very welcome sound filled her ears: the groaning and whirring of the TARDIS. Martha sprang up, a big grin on her face as the TARDIS materialized not ten feet away from them on the only patch of roughly even ground it could find.

“What’s that?” the werewolf rasped, alarmed.

“Don’t be scared!” she said. “It’s the TARDIS, this is your way out!”

The door opened and out stepped the Doctor, tall and upright, smiling back at her, and she couldn’t help herself: she ran to the Doctor and hugged him tight, the Doctor catching her too.

“Martha!”

“Doctor, you’re okay!” She stepped back, taking a breath. “Your leg–”

“Good as new,” the Doctor promised. “Two weeks’ rest in the TARDIS, lots of tea, bit of gentle exercise. I could run a marathon. I see you caught the werewolf–”

“Wait!” she said before he could stride forward. “It’s not what you think, he was a prisoner – he escaped from those men we were talking to!”

The Doctor took back the sonic screwdriver and the tracking device, tucking both into his pockets as she explained as quickly as she could. Meanwhile the creature, or Caleb, she wasn’t sure if both were present or how that worked, watched them huddled on the ground, coat wrapped around its shoulders.

“You want to leave?” asked the Doctor, looming over it. “Where to?”

*

The truth of the creature’s story was revealed in the basement. Chains on the wall where it had been locked up, a bed, and scratches on the door where it had tried to escape. They went back in time and witnessed it via a camera the Doctor planted in Findlay’s house: Caleb’s werewolf nature being revealed for the first time, his brother restraining him, the other two men, Glenn and Samuel, coming in later to strike a deal with Findlay. They’d even planted a GPS tracker on him, which explained how they’d been able to follow him.

“Looks like Glenn was the ringleader,” the Doctor said. They paid a visit to Glenn’s house too where they found the group’s stash of alien artifacts. “I think he’s been doing this for a while.”

“What do we do with Caleb?” Martha asked. “And the werewolf? He’s got nowhere to go.”

The Doctor tucked the object he had been examining, a strange, shimmering mirror, into his pocket. “Hmm? Good question. They’re two people in the same body. Far as I can tell, their power is roughly equal. The wolf hasn’t taken over the host, but Caleb isn’t fully human either.”

“Can you cure him? I mean, the wolf bit you, aren’t you infected too?”

“Barely,” the Doctor said. “I was only just bitten; it was easy to remove the infection at that stage. Caleb is too far gone.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Come on,” said the Doctor. “Back to the TARDIS.”

One last trip. Caleb – it was Caleb, she thought, his eyes were blue, not black – clung to the side of the console as the Doctor set a new destination.

Then he crouched down in front of the boy. “How’s your leg?”

“It’s stopped bleeding,” said Caleb, “but I can’t stand. Where am I? Who are you people?”

“I’m the Doctor and this is Martha.” He gestured at her, Martha offering a smile. “We’re going to help you but this is very important. We need to talk to both of you. You and the haemovariform.”

“The… what?”

“The werewolf.”

“Oh,” said Caleb. “It’s… I… We only wanted to escape. My brother, he fell in with some bad people–”

“I know,” said the Doctor softly. “I know it’s not your fault. Now both of you have to agree where to go. The wolf wants to leave this planet and maybe that’s safer, removing it from Earth, but it might be a bit of a shock for you.”

“Leave Earth?”

The boy looked utterly bewildered, and so he might, Martha thought. He hadn’t realised the lifeform inside him was alien.

“I can take you to a new planet,” the Doctor said. “Far in the future, colonised by humans so you’ll feel right at home. They can help you manage your condition. What do you say?”

“I… guess?”

Martha shook her head. “How can he make a decision like that when he doesn’t even know what planet you’re talking about? How far in the future?”

“I can show you,” said the Doctor, leaning forward. Very gently, he brushed his fingers against the boy’s temples and Caleb gasped, closing his eyes.

Then the Doctor leaned back and the boy’s eyes opened, a brilliant black. “I see,” it said.

“There are rules,” said the Doctor, his tone changing at once. He was stern, uncompromising. “You can’t infect anyone else without their prior consent. And you can’t go rampaging during a full moon. But you’ll be treated as your own species and allowed to live among your own kind.”

The creature was silent for several seconds, but it felt like longer, Martha holding her breath. Then it nodded.

“I accept.”

“Caleb?”

Blue eyes. Caleb nodded. “Okay.”

And the decision was made.

*

Later, after they’d dropped Caleb off at his new planet and the Doctor had contacted an organisation called Torchwood about the black market for alien artifacts, Martha leaned against the TARDIS console, pondering.

“There’s still one thing I don’t get, Doctor.”

The Doctor was cataloging the alien artifacts he’d confiscated. She privately made a bet to herself that he was going to keep all of them.

“What’s that?”

“The werewolf told me that it followed a signal to the top of the hill. What signal? Why would there have been a signal?”

“A signal? Something that drew it away from the city?”

She nodded.

“Aha,” said the Doctor. “Then I suppose we have one more thing left to do.”

“You mean… it’s us? We leave the signal?”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” he said, grabbing the tracker and pointing his sonic screwdriver at it. “I can broadcast at this same wavelength; it’ll sound like someone’s calling from home.”

“No, but…” She struggled to articulate her feelings on this. “If the signal comes from us, that means we caused this whole thing. The werewolf broke out because it heard the signal and thought that was its chance to escape. That means it’s our fault it killed three people, including Caleb’s brother!”

The Doctor looked up at her, frowning. “We also saved Caleb and stopped some dangerous alien artifacts being sold on the black market. That mirror contains an Eternity Pool. It could have trapped thousands of people.”

“But…”

A minute earlier the three dead men had been killed by a werewolf. She’d been fine with that. She hadn’t blamed Caleb, and she couldn’t blame the werewolf too much either because it had been trying to escape. It had acted in self-defense. But now she and the Doctor were behind it all. They had in effect orchestrated the werewolf’s escape, including those men’s deaths. That was… that was different, wasn’t it?

“Martha,” said the Doctor, coming over. He put his hands on her shoulders and gazed at her with those big brown eyes, and she thought suddenly about how old those eyes were. How much had he seen, in his long lifetime? How many decisions like this had he made? “When you were on the hillside with the werewolf, you could have killed it then and there. You could have picked up a gun and shot it dead. But you didn’t. Why?”

The possibility hadn’t even occurred to her.

“He was injured,” she said. “I’m a medical student, what else could I do?”

“Exactly,” he said. “You didn’t see a monster, you saw someone who was worth saving, and I for one trust your judgement on that, Martha Jones. What if the werewolf had escaped at some other time? It could have ravaged half the city. Or what if it had never escaped? It and Caleb would have been doomed to life as a prisoner.”

“Then what we did today… that’s the best possible outcome?”

Did he know? As a Time Lord, could he perceive different possibilities and act accordingly? She couldn’t imagine the burden of that.

The Doctor didn’t answer, returning to the console. But the signal they were about to plant would save lives, she thought. It prevented the werewolf from roaming about the city: that at least they could be certain of.

Life was full of decisions like that. Maybe even the Doctor couldn’t know all the hypotheticals. But they had to decide anyway.

“It’s ready to go,” said the Doctor, and she was sure from the sharpness of his gaze that he’d guessed what she was thinking. “Are you all right?”

She took a breath. “Yeah. Let’s go.”


End file.
